Are we willing to sacrifice medals for a greater good?

Sport is the very definition of a results business but success can be measured in more ways than first, second or third, writes Brendan O’Brien. 

Mick McCarthy was in flying form this week.

His Ipswich Town side had just put some distance between itself and the abyss that would be League One football with a 3-0 defeat of Wigan Athletic when the former Republic of Ireland player and manager reflected on what had been a rare chance to answer those fans who had been barracking him and his struggling team for months with a rare three points.

“Win games and they will come and they will cheer and they’ll be happy, that’s all it is,” McCarthy told the East Anglian Daily Times after the game at Portman Road last Tuesday evening.

“Free pies, free pints, fucking half-price, cushions on the seats, happy clappy, it’s all bollocks.”

Vintage Mick. But it isn’t as if supporters of the Tractor Boys are some oddity.

As sports fans, most of us care little for the nuances or the frantic paddling that goes on under the water in the hope of presenting an impression of serene excellence above it.

It’s win or you’re a loser. Show us the medals or off with your boots and don’t bother us again. Sport is the very definition of a results business but success can be measured in more ways than first, second or third.

On Wednesday afternoon a few hundred people, mostly administrators involved in the elite end of the high-performance sports industry, gathered in the O’Callaghan Davenport Hotel in Dublin to run through the gargantuan, 212-page document that is the official ‘Rio Review’ into Ireland’s performance at the last Olympic Games.

The key line didn’t pop up until page 193.

“Ask what we want to achieve as a sporting nation and what is our definition of world-class, and through that process define where our ambition lies,” it said.

This was the first of eight High-Performance system recommendations made. The third of them all but answered that question with its talk of a tiered funding model that would prioritise the sports most likely to medal for the most funding. We’re already well down that road.

Over 80% of the High-Performance funding for 2017 has just been doled out among ten sports. The other 20% is the small preserve of another 11. Haves, have littles and have nots. Ireland has been zeroing in on Olympic medals for a long time but it’s been a case of hedging bets until now. For here on in it will be a process of cold, hard, forensic analysis.

You’d imagine that can only be a good thing. It is and it isn’t.

Great Britain’s story tells us why. Track back 21 years and Team GB won just 15 medals at the Atlanta Games. By the time of Rio’s closing ceremony that number had vaulted to 67 but the collateral damage has been considerable. Sports with huge participation numbers, like basketball, have had funding ravaged. Wheelchair rugby has also fallen foul of that ethos.

If there has been one code at the vanguard of the great leap forward, it has been cycling and we know now that success in the velodrome has been achieved on the back of a bullying culture, questionable governance and shocking degrees of sexism. So it was intriguing to listen to Ed Warner, UK Athletics chairman, say last week that the country’s “no compromise” approach to medals should be reviewed.

“We have reached a point where the win-at-all-cost approach of UK Sport has had its time,” Warner said in the Guardian. “These issues must come to a head with a thorough review of the entire elite funding structure and principles underlying it. There is too much of a culture of medal winners and non-medal winners which is unhealthy and doesn’t speak well for us as a sporting society.”

Medals or participation? Or can we have both?

“I actually think (Warner) is right,” said Sport Ireland CEO John Treacy when the question about Ireland’s priorities were raised two days ago. “It is not all about gold, silver or bronze. So we need to be careful that we don’t go that direction. But what we want to do is provide the best opportunities we can for our best sportspeople on the international stage.”

Ireland has only ever won Olympic medals in six sports. Three of those — boxing, athletics and swimming — can boast high participation rates as well as the prospect of elite success.

The other trio of sailing, rowing and equestrian? Not so much. So, what of them? And what of a sport like modern pentathlon that delivered two top ten finishes in Rio but whose participation numbers are pitifully low and always likely to be?

New Zealand, with their 18 medals in Brazil, was mentioned time and again this week as the model Ireland should aspire towards but 11 of theirs were won on the water in sports that, rightly or wrongly, can be portrayed as elitist. Are we willing to sacrifice medals for a greater good? Or is it just all about the Tricolour being raised and Amhrán na bhFiann played?

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